‘You Can See It All Over. It’s Unwinding’

“There is no way a man like Donald Trump has any business being president,” the man told me. “You can’t talk like he does and expect people to give you the authority to run the country. The problem is that there is nobody to vote for. Look at all the rest of them running. This is the first time in my life that I don’t feel confident voting for anybody for president.”

And later, with a look of pained resignation on his face: “I tell you, people who don’t think this country is in serious trouble don’t know what they’re talking about. You can see it all over. It’s unwinding.”

I talked to the man, a conservative, at one of the events I went to over the weekend. Mind you, I am in a foul mood. I am three and a half weeks into this sinus infection I picked up in Italy. Antibiotics were only partly successful, and this past weekend, it started showing signs of possibly becoming walking pneumonia. So that’s just thrilling. I tell you this in case my comments here come across as more gloomy than usual.

Over the weekend, I had to drag my cranky self to several events in Baton Rouge and around my town — made much less cranky, although only temporarily, by the magic of a steroid injection — and ended up having some good Trumpish conversations at all of them. “Good” in the sense of people clearly having thought hard about our political situation, and being pretty worried about it. My supposition is that most of these people are fairly conservative, though in one case I spoke with someone who is active in Democratic Party politics. The sense of foreboding I picked up was deep, and went way beyond politics. I’m going to convey to you details I gathered, though I’m going to obscure some of them to protect identities.

One conversation I had at a Baton Rouge event involved a middle-aged white woman who was a longtime public school teacher in a predominantly black school. She is a Christian, and said that if she had not been able to see the face of Jesus in every one of her students, she wouldn’t have been able to stay at it for as long as she did. The problems of her students were completely overwhelming.

“For a long time, we had grandmothers raising children, because the mothers of our kids were strung out on drugs,” she said. “We used to be able to talk to the grandmothers, to let them know what was going on with their kids, by going out to the churches. Over time, the grandmothers slowly dropped out of church. Nowadays, most of them don’t go. We kept seeing grandmothers encouraging their teenage grandchildren to have babies to get another check.”

“That sounds unreal,” I said.

“I know, but it’s happening,” she said, with a look of sorrow. “I had an 18-year-old senior who had three children. Now, we don’t even know who is raising some of these kids.”

A white college professor told me he’s blown away by how hard his working-class students, especially the black ones, work in the face of the desperate circumstances in which they were raised. He said that most of the students who make it into his classes are older, and are not there to play college. They want to learn something, and work. The lives so many of them come out of were badly broken by their parents, or parent.

The professor said that some of the writing assignments his students get involve personal essays. The things they tell you about the lives they have, and have had growing up, boggle the middle-class mind. He said that getting to know these students over the years has made him acutely aware of how devastating divorce is, or having parents who never married. He told a couple of stories that I don’t feel comfortable relating here, even in this vague way. Heartbreaking stuff.

I mentioned to this professor, and to one of his colleagues, a conversation I had had several years ago with professors at a conservative Christian college, in which they expressed deep concern that their students would ever be able to form stable families. This had shocked me because this school was, well, religious, and conservative. How could these kids be so unaware of what a family is, according to the traditional Christian model? The professors (at that Christian college) assured me that it’s not a matter of knowing in your head, but rather a matter of not ever having seen a stable, intact, functional family. The ideal family for them is an abstraction.

These are not the unchurched poor of the housing project or the trailer park. These are middle-class Christian kids. When I told that story to the professors this weekend, they nodded in recognition. They see it too. Every day.

Also over the weekend, I talked to someone who is an administrator at a Catholic school. She said that the teachers at her school say that they are having the worst time trying to get the kids to write logically coherent papers. They simply do not seem to grasp cause and effect. These are not the poor. These are middle class kids. The administrator is baffled and alarmed.

I mentioned to the administrator a conversation I had earlier had with a man whose job as a counselor brings him into daily contact with the public, and who had said to me — in a Trump-related conversation — how frustrated he was with the middle and upper-middle class people he works with. He said that their family life could be falling apart, but they will not accept responsibility for it. They will go to the mat defending indefensible behavior from their children, and defending their own parenting.

The cases, said the man, can be shocking in their obviousness, but these middle-class parents absolutely refuse to look critically at themselves and the way they live, and raise their children. He said that it’s very difficult to pierce the shield of self-protection and self-deception that these people have erected around themselves. It’s always somebody else’s fault.

“Their kids have no direction,” he said. “I’ll have in my office college-age young people with strong test scores and good grades, but no direction. They’re just drifting, and they’re getting no direction from their parents.”

The counselor is around my age. I suggested to him that our generation was not raised that way, but that’s how we seem to be raising our kids.

“This is new,” he said. “I don’t know where this comes from.”

Again: he’s not talking about the poor or the working class. He’s talking about middle class people. He’s talking about the kind of people who look at the dysfunctional black and white poor and working classes and think, thank God I’m not like them.

But they are like them. They just have money. For now.

Anyway, I brought up the counselor’s conversation to the Catholic school administrator, and she shook her head affirmatively.

“All the time,” she said. And she gave examples of the way middle-class parents treat her and her teachers. It’s always Somebody Else’s Fault. Everybody wants to blame Somebody Else for their troubles, the administrator said. I suggested that there is a connection between this and the kids in her school being unable to write papers demonstrating logical, cause-and-effect reasoning. People have become used to thinking of themselves passively, as objects acted upon, instead of acting subjects.

Another person, a Christian, said to me, later, “I’m sick of churches these days. Everything is geared towards ‘meeting your needs.’ They have so many ministries and programs for every possible group, and don’t get me wrong, a lot of them do real good. But the overall effect is to train us to expect to be catered to. If somebody isn’t meeting our needs, then somebody is failing us. That’s the mindset. But that’s not Christianity. It’s supposed to be hard! It’s the Cross!”

A reader sent in the other day this passage from FDR’s 1932 Inaugural (emphasis his):

“Out of every crisis, every tribulation, every disaster, mankind rises with some share of greater knowledge, of higher decency, of purer purpose. Today we shall have come through a period of loose thinking, descending morals, an era of selfishness, among individual men and women and among Nations. Blame not Governments alone for this. Blame ourselves in equal share. Let us be frank in acknowledgment of the truth that many amongst us have made obeisance to Mammon, that the profits of speculation, the easy road without toil, have lured us from the old barricades. To return to higher standards we must abandon the false prophets and seek new leaders of our own choosing.”

The more things change, the more they stay the same, I reckon.

Honestly, I’ve had it with people. I’ve had it with Trump supporters who think their anger and their outrage gives them the right to punch people in the face. I’ve had it with Black Lives Matter and other Social Justice Warriors who think the so-called righteousness of their cause gives them the right to silence those who disagree with them. I’m sick and tired of people who think everything wrong in their lives is because somebody, somewhere, has wronged them. Guess what? You can’t screw whoever you like, have as many kids as you like, or as many partners as you like, walk away from your marriage (if you ever marry), and expect everything to be okay. You can’t drink, drug, party, “keep it real,” make excuses for your children, make excuses for yourself, allow our degraded popular culture to raise your kids, and expect a good outcomes. You can’t throw money at problems and expect them to go away (e.g., pay to send your kids to a Christian school, and assume that your tuition fee contractually entitles you to opt out of the moral and spiritual formation of your children), or assume that being a Nice Middle-Class Person is sufficient. It’s not. I’m tired of the rich and the middle class who expect everything to be handed to them, and fall to pieces when it isn’t. I’m tired of the working class and the poor who live as if their relative material deprivation gives them a pass from having to live by basic standards of conduct that most everybody understood and affirmed within living memory, but which are all but forgotten today.

Above all, I’m tired of a culture in which so many people have no idea how to tell themselves no, to anything, ever. A culture of entitlement. Believe me, I’m talking to myself as well. This is the beginning of Lent for us Orthodox Christians, and I am taking inventory of my own tendencies to sin, to disorder, and I don’t like what I see. You might try it too.

In less poetic language, Marco concedes that we all have inclinations toward sin, but we can still see good and evil, and have the power, through free will, to resist our sinful inclinations. If we refuse sin the first time, and keep doing so, there’s nothing within our own natures that we cannot overcome. This is what Purgatory is all about: straightening through ascetic labors the crooked paths within us, making ourselves ready for Heaven. Marco goes on to say that if we submit ourselves, in our freedom, to God (“a greater power”), we free ourselves from the forces of fate and instinct. Here’s the clincher:

“Therefore, if the world around you goes astray,

in you is the cause and in you let it be sought…”

Boom, there it is. If you want a world of peace, order, and virtue, then first conquer your own rebel mind and renegade heart. Quit blaming others for the problems in your life, and take responsibility for yourself, and your own restoration. God is there to help you reach your “better nature,” but because you are free, the decision is in your hands.

But you know Dante: there are always public consequences of private vices. In the next line, Marco turns to political philosophy, explaining that as babies, we are all driven by unformed and undirected desire. If we are not restrained in the beginning, we continue on this path, until we become ever more corrupt. This is why we have the law to educate and train us, and leaders to help us find our way to virtue. The problem with the world today, Marco avers, is bad government, secular and ecclesial — especially that of Pope Boniface VIII (his name cloaked here), a wicked man who leads his flock astray.

The rest of this canto concerns itself with analyzing great political questions of Dante’s time, in light of what comes before. For us, we should focus on how the failure of authoritative moral leadership in the family, in the church, in the school, and in other institutions, has brought about our current crisis. Remember how on the terrace of Envy, Guido railed against the progressive decline in moral order owing to parents not raising their children to love virtue? We see a similar judgment here. Yes, each person must be held accountable for his own sins. But it is also the case that the abdication of authority and responsibility by those who ought to be teaching, guiding, and forming the consciences of the young plays a role. Ignorance of the moral law is ultimately not an excuse, but as ever in Dante’s vision, we are not only responsible for ourselves, but also for our neighbors in the family of God (notice that Marco began his address by calling Dante “brother”). If society’s institutions fail to govern justly and teach rightly, the consciences of others will not be “rightly nurtured,” and will, therefore, be conquered by vice.

As it was in the 14th century, is now, and ever shall be. Human nature does not change. Yes, American institutions have failed. A lot of this stuff really is Somebody Else’s Fault. Big business. Big government. The Republicans, the Democrats. The media. The leaders. The followers. The blacks, the whites, the men, the women, Hispanics, gays, Christians, Jews, Muslims, academics, workers, and on and on.

But here’s the thing: you and I, we are somebody else’s Somebody Else.

It’s all anecdotal, these conversations I’ve had this weekend, but thinking about them all on Sunday night, I recall how very little actual political content there was. I don’t know how many of these people I talked to — most of whom were strangers to me — are Trump voters, or planning to vote at all. (The one acknowledged liberal Democrat I talked to lamented how the extremes run both parties, and how partisanship has disempowered the vast middle by demonizing anything that breaks ideological orthodoxy.) What was present in these conversations was fear and anxiety, and a sense that what is wrong with America is much more deep-seated than any politician’s ability to fix. The rot, the decadence. You can see it all over. It’s unwinding.

Hide 142 comments

142 Responses to ‘You Can See It All Over. It’s Unwinding’

Yes, you should be able to support yourself and family….if you work hard, etc. That’s rarely what it is about….the recent formulation (did you read my post?) is “get ahead” not “support”.

That implies constant universal and seemingly relative income growth! How can everyone “get ahead” simultaneously in relative terms? And why is anyone ordained to NEVER have any economic setbacks or losses in the market reflecting changed technology or consumer preferences? Everyone’s income is guaranteed to “get ahead” forever no matter what as long as they just show up and aren’t a criminal? (By the way, everyone’s income is someone else’s expense.) No one should ever have to make any economic adjustment if anyone else is “getting ahead”? Impossible and the expectation of it leads to the current insanity.

Maybe we can bring back the buggy whip manufacturers and the typewriter repairman while we’re at it. Ask Trump about it; he’ll tell you what you want to hear. And Bernie’s all for it, too!

Actually taxes as a percentage of gdp have been quite stable since the great depression (17% or so), with the obvious blip during WWII. Source: Tax Policy
Institute. There are so many factors that play into where this country is right now. Not the least of which are fiascos such as the Fed. Born in 1913, their mandate was to protect the value of the dollar. 100 years and a 96% drop in the value of the dollar later, it is no wonder two wage earner families are the norm. When Nixon took us off the gold standard completely, inflation accelerated. When child rearing was outsourced, which happened within ten years of no fault divorce sweeping the nation, the family’s disintegration accelerated. At the same time, government kept growing and growing. As it grew, it usurped more of the typical roles of parents. Today, our school teachers provide more parenting than many of those with children attending those schools. Today, the schools provide free lunches during the school year and summers. They even send food home with kids over weekends. All this with the highest level of food stamp use ever, by any metric.

And if you’re denying that SS is a Ponzi scheme you are sadly uninformed….Medicare doesn’t even pretend to be self-funding: most of its expenses are covered by general taxes, not payroll taxes and the average recipient receives about times their payroll taxes.

While I like “Trumpen-proletariat”, much of the above isn’t remotely true.

SS is FTMP actuarially sound–except for the little bit of the trust fund consisting of Treasury notes rather than cash. Assuming the US Treasury doesn’t default on its obligations to SS, SS will be fine–possibly with minor tweaking. It is not, under any stretch of the imagination, a Ponzi scheme.

The primary risk to SS are certain politicians (mostly Republicans) who seem to want to stiff the SS trust fund in order to finance other budget priorities (often tax cuts or corporate welfare or military pork). Many of them use a laughably bad argument–we must cut benefits to prevent benefit cuts–to justify this. Which would be like me telling the bank that I have to reduce my mortgage payment, because otherwise I might go into foreclosure.

Medicare suffers from the problem that all health insurance programs (or things like them) suffer from–rising healthcare costs. It doesn’t help when legislation limits the ability of Medicare to negotiate for things like lower drug costs, something Il Trumpe has apparently noticed, but been a Democratic gripe for quite a while.

I am a Catholic voting for Bernie! I am still a conservative in many ways, but I recognize the inequality. I live in San Francisco, where the average, yes, average, home sells for $1.3 million. Most in the middle of this nation have no idea what is happening in the major cultural hubs of this country. The problem is not the poor. The problem are very wealthy people who earned hundreds of millions of dollars and pay an effective tax rate less than 20%. Meanwhile, conservatives are obsessed with military spending. Never mind that in much of the world we are seen as the evil empire. The party of Lincoln, T. Roosevelt and Reagan has truly lost its way. Now I, a former conservative who voted for W. Bush, will now vote for the best option we got…Bernie!

“I suggested that there is a connection between this and the kids in her school being unable to write papers demonstrating logical, cause-and-effect reasoning. People have become used to thinking of themselves passively, as objects acted upon, instead of acting subjects.”

This seems quite far-fetched to me, in part because logical and causal connections are not at all the same (though good luck figuring that out from middle and high school curricula), and in part because a much better explanation is so nearby. People who have never been trained to take responsibility will tend not to master things that are difficult and require self-mastery and persistent application – such as learning logic, or how to write well, or how to use constructive criticism.

Your response is nothing but a repition of hackneyed glibertarian talking points. We have had the SS discussion here before. One of our regular commenters is a pension actuary and he has debunked the claim that SS is doomed for the fraud that it is. You do not even seem to know the meaning of the term “Ponzi scheme”. (Hint: no one is actually getting rich from SS; it pays a very basic income).
FDR was of course a war president and those always take on extra powers. Comparing him to Mussolini is an inane as comparing George W Bush to Hitler.

Re: Yes, you should be able to support yourself and family….if you work hard, etc. That’s rarely what it is about

I don’t know who you are listening to but I have never heard anyone claim that hard work alone should enable a person to become rich.

A lot of hand wringing and blame to go around, and although “Roosevelt” had something to say about it, so does God. You say: “People have become used to thinking of themselves passively, as objects acted upon, instead of acting subjects.” Really? If we have lost our way the question is why? Without answering that and answering it correctly we will not find our why back. You condemn the angry mob and then go on to say how “tired” you are of this and that full circle to the old solution that we are to look inward and change the world. That’s it? We just change ourselves and the world will be a better place? Although self awareness is a good thing, there is more. And so you say – Quote: “If society’s institutions fail to govern justly and teach rightly, the consciences of others will not be “rightly nurtured,” and will, therefore, be conquered by vice.” So FDR says: “To return to higher standards we must abandon the false prophets and seek new leaders of our own choosing.” I don’t think he was directly speaking to you at the time but then again, maybe he was. Maybe to enough millions who are “tired” too, who are tired of being “sucker punched” by “society’s institutions” that grossly “fail to govern justly and teach rightly”, maybe the millions DO get it and are just plain “tired”. Maybe they are tired of being blamed for the world’s ills and being told to just “look within” while the outside is crumbling into a cesspool of anarchy, stench, and every form of immorality, inviting us… no demanding, that we “jump in” and get dirty. And we wonder why we are so easily deceived, why our “leaders” are corrupt, liars, greedy, immoral, untrustworthy. To choose new leaders and return to higher standards we must be able to discern WHAT IS A HIGHER STANDARD! And so as I said earlier “Although self awareness is a good thing, there is more.” And the more is…. you guessed it, the one true GOD! When we are persuaded to turn our backs on God we are persuaded to turn our backs on ourselves. Without HIS direction there is no direction at all, there is no “governing justly and teaching rightly”, there are no “rightly nurtured consciences”, there is no “higher standard”. Without the “high standard” God gives us to follow and embrace, there is only another “sucker punch” waiting around the corner for all of us to take.

” Born in 1913, their mandate was to protect the value of the dollar. 100 years and a 96% drop in the value of the dollar later, it is no wonder two wage earner families are the norm.”

Gold bugs love this datum, but it is utterly, ridicilously, meaningless. Money has no intrinsic value: it just an instrument to measure other items. Therefore, to argue that the value of the dollar collapsed, you would need to show that the median American worker has 4% of the purchasing power of his 1913 peer…

“I am a Catholic voting for Bernie! I am still a conservative in many ways, but I recognize the inequality. I live in San Francisco, where the average, yes, average, home sells for $1.3 million”

As someone in general sympathy to Sanders, let me note that one of the problems plaguing SF housing market are anti-density regulations- often enacted by people who support Bernie and hate the capitalist real estate developers. The case of housing is really one of the few cases where a dose of supply and demand can ameliorate our problems.

Isn’t it true that since Reagan, the rich are taxed less and the less well off are taxed more? In relative terms.

As for social breakdown, there is a chicken – egg quality to the situation. But I do think that the disappearance of manufacturing jobs and opportunities for the less-educated is a fundamental cause for a lot of current social dysfunction. And it’s also the reason ‘minorities’ have suffered higher rates of such dysfunction; they’ve always had access to fewer well-paying opportunities.

You have an actual pension actuary who says otherwise? Do tell! Well, I guess that’s it then! End of discussion!

Here is reality: there is NO “trust fund”; it is an accounting fiction, a bookkeeping entry. In order for the SS benefits to be paid in the near future payroll tax cash flow will be insufficient. The choice then is: raise taxes; issue incremental debt TO THE PUBLIC, not an accounting entry; cut other spending; cut benefits. Period.

Note that this is EXACTLY the case that obtains if there NO “trust fund”! Identical!
It is just part of the tissue of lies constituting the unfunded, non means tested entitlement-regulatory-welfare state.

I’ll deal with the other fantasies in another post.

But I will observe that it is exceedingly odd to see verbatim left wing defenses of FDR and the welfare state from supposed conservatives. Ever heard of Buckley, Goldwater, Reagan, Hayek, Milton Friedman? They are rolling over in their graves.

May I point out that self-control and responsibility are not habits only manifested by followers of traditional religions. Quite a lot of those of us who follow non-traditional paths can demonstrate such as well.

I think the importance is learning self-discipline of any form. And humility. Empathy for others. But I prefer to organize my life and mind via a philosophy rather than a religion (you’d make this decision as well if you had to deal with my deities. Talk about cosmic soap operas.)

[NFR: In the South, this code was more of a Stoic thing than a Christian one. That was certainly the way it was with my father. — RD]

As someone in general sympathy to Sanders, let me note that one of the problems plaguing SF housing market are anti-density regulations- often enacted by people who support Bernie and hate the capitalist real estate developers. The case of housing is really one of the few cases where a dose of supply and demand can ameliorate our problems.

Yes, The Economist says that the only solution to soaring real estate prices in London is to gut the greenbelt and let them build on it. That would produce more London (or more San Francisco), even more densely packed, with continued upward pressure on real estate. Incidentally, the same critique has been made about Jane Jacob’s battles with Robert Moses over the future of Washington Square Park and Greenwich Village.

What’s missing is, we could reduce the demand by relocating jobs and enterprises. There are scenic areas of Wyoming, Idaho, there is more to New Mexico than Taos and Albuquerque… its the concentration of jobs and enterprises that makes density of population all but inevitable. Ditto for Portland… if you want to preserve open space, move some of the jobs to Medford and Grant’s Pass.

Most of us here are not real conservatives or real libertarians, that is, we don’t smoke dope, we aren’t transexuals, we don’t run hedge funds, we procreate, we don’t adopt, we don’t like open borders, we think America is a Christian country and we think Bismarck was the greatest leader in modern history.

And Bismarck, being the bleeding heart liberal that he was, established social insurance programs for industrial workers: health insurance, worker’s compensation, old age and disability insurance. We follow the example of Bismarck over real “conservatives” and “libertarians”.

We prefer order and stability over anarcho-tyranny. We think it is the government’s job to control the terrorists (and the swifter the better), not to manage the general population so as to avoid giving offense to terrorists.

We don’t think the USA will be improved by becoming culturally and institutionally and economically more like Syria or Pakistan or Zimbabwe or Honduras or Venezuela. We don’t want to live in any of those countries, and we want a better future for our children than any of those countries could provide.

We speak English, because it is our native tongue, and we expect that anyone who comes here should be fluent in English too. [But we are preparing for your socially-engineered Balkan state, and when it blossoms, we will know what to do, rest assured.]

But don’t think we aren’t multiculturalists: while in times past, they may have been accorded the status of “virtues”, today we call them “Asian values”, and we support “Asian values”, and we can even appreciate an inspired translation of the Confucian Canon.

Re: You have an actual pension actuary who says otherwise? Do tell! Well, I guess that’s it then! End of discussion!

Franklin Evans (a long-time poster here) may comment with detail if he wishes (he did so rather recently on another thread on this very subject). And why do you reject expertise on the subject? Are political propagandists a better source.

On the 10,000 foot high view, please answer the following:

1. What is the anticipated payment total for Social Security between now and the end of the century?
2. What is the expected US total GDP between now and the end of the century?
3. If you do not believe that Sum(GDP) >> Sum(SS) then you need up explain why. What catastrophe will intervene to produce that result?

It’s perfectly OK to reply “No one can certain at all of such a long term forecast”– but then that overturns your prediction too.

In short, barring major catastrophes (nuclear war, asteroid stroke, super-volcano, highly lethal pandemic), the Unites States will be able to pay out future Social Security benefits without economic difficulty.

Re: Here is reality: there is NO “trust fund”; it is an accounting fiction,

Depends what you mean by “fiction”. Your bank account (IRA, 401K) etc. is also a fiction: there is no stack of benjamins in the bank vault with your name on it. It exists only because the bank (and the law) says it does. And given a sufficient catastrophe it too could vanish like a dream before the dawn. That’s economics for you. It’s all a pretend game that works because we insist en masse that it does.

You have an actual pension actuary who says otherwise? Do tell! Well, I guess that’s it then! End of discussion!

What do YOU got, other than loudly-repeated assertions that consist nothing of other than glibertarian talking points we’ve heard before?

Here is reality: there is NO “trust fund”; it is an accounting fiction, a bookkeeping entry. In order for the SS benefits to be paid in the near future payroll tax cash flow will be insufficient.

At issue, it seems, is whether you view the Social Security Trust Fund as a creditor of the United States, to the tune of $4T, or basically a subaccount in the Treasury’s general ledger, with no greater claim on Federal funds than any discretionary program Congress might fashion.

When I say that Social Security is “actuarially sound”, that means a rather specific thing: expected revenues from FICA payroll taxes is projected to cover expected benefits and administrative costs, well into the future. Some tweaking may be required here, but the inputs balance the outputs. Neither additional taxes nor additional debt are required, to pay the program’s obligations.

The choice then is: raise taxes; issue incremental debt TO THE PUBLIC, not an accounting entry; cut other spending; cut benefits. Period.

If such is true, ’tis precisely because FICA is a creditor of the Treasury, and that portion of the national debt will need to be paid for somehow.

The biggest threat to Social Security comes from right-wing politicians and their fellow-travelers who, having run up big bills on such things as tax cuts and other pet projects, want to pay for it all by welshing on obligations to retirees. Saying “it’s all one big pot of money, so everyone gets a haircut” is how they intend to transfer trillions of dollars in wealth from pensioners to the beneficiaries of corporate welfare.

But I will observe that it is exceedingly odd to see verbatim left wing defenses of FDR and the welfare state from supposed conservatives. Ever heard of Buckley, Goldwater, Reagan, Hayek, Milton Friedman? They are rolling over in their graves.

You forget Rand and Rothbard. If that’s true, though, perhaps we should then attach turbines to their rotting corpses and put them to good use.

There is no God but the Market, and Hayek is his profit.

As I’ve noted before, it must really suck to be a glibertarian in this election cycle. When Hillary Clinton is the major-party candidate least offensive to your ideology, that’s gotta sting, no?

At any rate, gold prices have been dropping of late, so you probably should go stock up.

@Grumpy Realist “May I point out that self-control and responsibility are not habits only manifested by followers of traditional religions. Quite a lot of those of us who follow non-traditional paths can demonstrate such as well.”

Look no further than our own “Poor Richard”, that great, good, and wise man, Benjamin Franklin.

The Democrats vilify Trump. The Republicans hate him even more–indeed, seem willing to do anything to stop him, even organize and fund violent protests intended to produce another ’68 Chicago Convention. Traditional conservatives fear and loathe him, seeing him as the final nail in the West’s coffin. Left socialists see him as a Capitalist Trickster, worse than even Cruz. To Blacks, Latinos and Muslims he is a racist hater, a Manhattan George Wallace. To Wall Street he is a traitor to his class–and worst of all, a protectionist. To virtually anyone of taste and refinement he is a crude, bombastic demagogue–Berlusconi American-style. As for the media–liberal, conservative, Maoist, Rosicrucian–Trump is a man without a home, a candidate without honor, the Man Who Must Be Rejected.

So what happens if it turns out that a huge percentage of Americans support what he says, how he behaves, and who he is?

What if a majority of Americans reveal themselves as unacceptable,intolerable, as beyond the pale?

Well, aren’t we a collection of Gloomy Gusses (Geese?)
The point about the FDR speech was glossed over. How about the concerns from 2300 years go on the state of Athenian youth?
Lack of historical perspective is conducive to hysteria.
Take a deep breath, comb your hair, and look up. The sky is NOT falling! (As much as it makes headlines.)

Years ago, a freakonomics show discussed lower standards for teachers. Their explanation was at one time the smartest women become teachers. When more careers opened up, the smartest women became lawyers and doctors. The pool of new teachers has not been as smart for the last fifty years.

“Their kids have no direction,” he said. “I’ll have in my office college-age young people with strong test scores and good grades, but no direction. They’re just drifting, and they’re getting no direction from their parents.”
——————————————————————–
Parents have farmed their parenting out. Kids are pushed into group activities, whether daycare or after school care with kind teachers. However teachers aren’t a parent who knows them intimately. Children need guidance to figure out who they are.

Or, they are getting so much direction. Many kids are over scheduled, between soccer games, musical lessons, girl/boy scouts and whatever. These kids are pushed from activity to activity, getting participation awards in all, without an sense of who they are and what they are really good at.

No gold holdings here. But it is an indisputable truth that inflation is how governments take wealth from their citizenry.

BT, the top 1% of income earners pay 50% of the income taxes received by the government.I am not in the top 1%, and at my age will never be, but at some point a person would stop producing if the return is diminished.

Adwilson–just think of it as insurance against getting hanged on a lamppost or shoved up against a wall and shot.

1) You really don’t want to be the target when a revolution comes.
2) there are more non-rich people than rich people
3) when the bulk of people give up hope that their condition will get better, you have the basis for revolutions.
4) Therefore: best to not let the situation get to the point where people despair that much, no?

Grumpy Realist: I respect your choice to follow your philosophy rather than “religion” (I hope you would respect my choice to follow God) and I agree that anyone who sets out to follow a higher standard as you mention can certainly be a positive influence. But one man’s idea of a higher standard is not necessarily that of another and so we are still without a sure-footed foundation. And without a coherent, consistent, tried and proven standard put in place foundation, there is no foundation at all but instead a shifting-sands-with-the-will-of-man foundation that can and will be corrupted (and who would admit as much but instead still want to say it is “good”). Some would balk at this and say then we are no longer availed free choice but we already are limited in our choices by current law. It is when law becomes based on the will of man and not the standards of God that we begin to see trouble and the corruption of a society that starts to crumble under the shifting sands of every sort of “free will”. It is exactly the restraint you are talking about that GIVES ALL OF US the freedom to live peacefully and in harmony. Without the high standard of God we are left to our own devices, these which can easily fragment into very destructive consequences.

Collecting usury or extracting land rents or raking a percentage off in transaction fees off financial speculation is not “economic production” any more that sodomy is procreation.

The 1% today did not get to the top by producing anything, by and large, they got there through financial schemes. George Soros his money off manipulating the financial system (ditto the majority of the other billionaires).

Today’s 1% is an entirely different class of people from yesterday’s Henry Ford. They don’t build, they trade, speculate and lend, its all financial shenanigans.

So much mis-information. SS is called a Ponzi scheme because it is a program whihc is pay as you go. No it is not an actual Ponzi scheme, but neither is it what has been sold to citizens, a program by which individuals contribute and which pays a return upon retirement. It has to have more contributors than it has retirees in order to keep contributions low enough to stop contributors from rebelling.
It is not solvent because congress, containing members of both parties can redirect funds collected into the general fund or worse, pay out from borrowed money.
For the contributors it is worse because if the same money was actually invested the rate of return would likely be higher.
GDP should never be brought into any discussion of government spending. GDP is made up of assets which belong to individual citizens (and residents) not to the government. The government has no more right to the assets contained in the GDP than any other entity that does not own those assets. SO saying its alright for a nation to be at some arbitrary level of debt because its GDP is whatever is faulty logic. It makes as much sense as saying I should be able to borrow money against your assets.
There are many definitions of what money represents. Using a money based on a commodity doesn’t necessarily make that currency inflation proof. It does however make it more inflation proof than using fiat currency. It is true that the money in my bank account is fiat currency, which only exists in a computer. But the money in my safety deposit box, in gold and silver is not subject to the same potential problems that my bank account and fiat money in general are, provided I can actually get it out of the bank, of course.
In a real disaster holding gold and silver will not be much better than holding worthless dollars. You can’t eat either. Seed stock and bullets will be much more valuable.
It is quite clear that the U.S. is on a downward spiral. Heck the entirety of western civilization is spiraling out of control. We are on the verge of a new dark age. Like those Romans of the fifth century eventually history will point to some specific event that will signal the fall, but for them life will have just seem to have gotten harder and worse as they progress to their eventual death. Memories of their great past will linger, but they know their children will see a dimmer world than they.

I don’t reject expertise; I reject posters who have to appeal to un-named authority and no argumentation. Glib?

If you want the reality of the unfunded non means tested entitlement regime just read the annual Report of the Commissioners of SS. I’m not doing your research for you and the burden of proof is not on me.

You’ll find that THEY say that on a cash flow basis SS cannot pay all promised benefits starting in 2017 or even this year. Therefore they will “access” the “trust fund”. All this means is that current period general revenues will pay the shortfall, which will accelerate until about 2035 when the “trust fund” is exhausted. Q.E.D.

Your point about the GDP is interesting. However, as your actuary pal might tell you it isn’t the “Sum” of future GDP vs. SS payments, it’s the present value that is of interest — a glib technical point to New Dealers no doubt.

The PV of the SS revenues is exceeded by the (actuarial) PV of the promised benefits by a huge amount; look it up.

What you’re saying is that the economy can be milked — by additional TAXES —- to pay benefits, that’s all; there is “headroom” because entitlements haven’t eaten everything yet!

THAT is exactly my point! The system is insolvent because the taxes plus “trust fund” are inadequate, not that the ECONOMY can’t be further burdened to pay unfunded non means tested benefits. Thank you for that. Q.E.D. again.

But here is the main issue. Current recipients receive MORE than they ever paid in plus some assumed real rate of return on their “contributions”. Future recipients will receive FAR LESS. In fact, anyone born after 1970 is literally better off burying their SS taxes in the backyard!

And that is the very definition of a Ponzi scheme. Early participants get handsome returns — from the payments made by later participants. Ida Mae Fuller puts in $25 and gets $12,000; my children put in hundreds of thousands and what they get back is less than a zero return.

So even if the SS cash flows can be made good by lots more confiscation of GDP — which, of course they can be —- so what? The point is SS is a lousy, indeed, unconscionable deal for later cohorts, funded by a now huge massively regressive tax scheme. It is an unsustainable Ponzi scheme based on lies and misdirection.

As it is the foundation for the welfare state no conservative can defend it even if we have to live with it and fix it.

At issue, it seems, is whether you view the Social Security Trust Fund as a creditor of the United States, to the tune of $4T, or basically a subaccount in the Treasury’s general ledger, with no greater claim on Federal funds than any discretionary program Congress might fashion.

Just so. That, in fact, happens to be the LAW! SS benefits are NOT, by the terms of the law itself and SCOTUS decisions, obligations of the U.S. government. It’s a discretionary spending program with an economically meaningless special tax administratively associated with it.

…expected revenues from FICA payroll taxes is projected to cover expected benefits and administrative costs, well into the future. Some tweaking may be required here, but the inputs balance the outputs. Neither additional taxes nor additional debt are required, to pay the program’s obligations.

This is just flat out false. Read the SS Commissioners Report; on a cash flow basis it’s underwater now and the bogus “trust fund” runs out by 2035. And contradictory: if “some tweaking” is required it is by definition not “actuarially sound”. The “tweaking” is massive. Higher taxes and reduced benefits for future recipients.

If such is true, ’tis precisely because FICA is a creditor of the Treasury, and that portion of the national debt will need to be paid for somehow.

No…it is because as a POLITICAL matter these are political promises made on a huge scale to millions who believed them and depend on the benefits. They are not legal obligations.

This misses the point, though. The PV of the benefits minus the PV of remaining taxes is NEGATIVE for those born after about 1970-75. If you increase SS taxes (“tweak”)you have to also REDUCE the proportional future benefits to younger cohorts or else you’re just digging the hole deeper! A Ponzi scheme.

The “wealth transfer” point is just laughable. Recipients have no LEGAL claim on anything and their administrative claim to benefits is unfunded and in large measure based on age cohort unearned in the sense that the PV of their benefits exceeds the value of their total taxes paid plus interest.

Good to see that you mock the founders and foundational principles of conservatism, a frequent theme here. No doubt you are aware that this all lines up with the views of the execrable left wing Salon, The Nation, and Bernie/Hillary…..objectively, left, comrade….populism is objectively left.

FYI, Treasury Notes are the equivalent of cash — completely liquid and risk-free. The key point, unaddressed, is that the entitlements are UNFUNDED. We know this because the mechanics of “redeeming” the “trust fund” are IDENTICAL to the case where there is NO trust fund! It’s all a sham, an intentional illusion.

And NO ONE…EVER….not Goldwater, not Milton Friedman, not Reagan, not Paul Ryan proposed cutting benefits for existing recipients. That includes such worthy recipients of middle income taxes redistributed to them as Warren Buffet, George Soros, Bill Gates…or Donald Trump. Ever.

SS reform proposals have all been to “reduce” the increase in benefits implied by the benefits formulas relating income and perforce payroll taxes to future benefits. In exchange, most proposals offer to relieve younger cohorts of the burden of payroll taxes in part at least; their promised benefits, recall, are way less than their taxes so SS has for them literally negative value. The unfunded SS liability, if treated as an actual obligation adds scores of trillions of dollars to the national debt of ~$19 trillion, so this exchange cuts no one’s current benefits but does over time reduce this implied but off books liability.

By the way, it is a common banking practice in a distressed borrower to reduce or spread out payments or take a small reduction in principal to avoid a much bigger loss on repossession if there is a default.

Medicare suffers from the problem that all health insurance programs (or things like them) suffer from–rising healthcare costs. It doesn’t help when legislation limits the ability of Medicare to negotiate for things like lower drug costs…

Actually, drug costs are a relatively modest proportion of the total Medicare expenditures — something like 20% IIRC. And part of the reason for the pricing structure is that lower total pharmaceutical cost would be at the expense of limiting the “formulary” — the list of drugs approved. Medicare recipients want NO restrictions on any medical treatments.

And that is the key reason for “Rising healthcare costs”. Medicare is blank check to seniors for virtually any medical care they want. Unlimited demand….but supply is not unlimited. So “costs” go up….but because of the huge impact of Medicare — old people consume much more disproportionate health care/medical services, naturally. But there is a single payer….so price paid by Medicare is lower and the difference shifted to non-Medicare patients,i.e., private insurers and self payers. Medicare lifetime expenditures per recipient are something like 4 times the taxes + returns paid by recipients. In the aggregate current period Medicare payroll taxes are significantly less than expenditures, the shortfall covered by general revenues.

It’s unsustainable; one reason for Obamacare is to create a slow motion single payer system covering everybody. Then they’d be able to ration old people via a “global budget” without their being able to tell. Otherwise it is politically impossible to control Medicare spending.

Social Security is a form of insurance– it is NOT an investment program. One would not whine about not getting back the premiums one paid for one’s homeowners insurance, so neither should one complain about paying more into SS than one gets back.

With that I am going to cease to interact with you on this topic. Your beliefs are rooted in faith, and are impervious to any reasoned argument, rather like those who insist on a 6000 year old Earth. There is no point in my continuing this.

We had enough of Christianity having bloody battles throughout Europe for 250 years to finally decide: ok, let’s agree to disagree. That’s sort of at which point that the good ol’ USA was founded. There are reasons why we have the secularity baked into it–we’ve seen in history what happens when you don’t.

So you basically end at the same spot for the Commonweath as I end up individually: once you “agree to disagree” (which my deities certainly do), what basis do you have for making judgments?

Your insurance claim is the usual — and laughably false — leftwing claim reverted to when the dishonesty is exposed. It is the opposite of what the New Deal claimed when they defended SS to SCOTUS! And the opposite of what the left justification always is.

Here’s the deal from this female Trump supporter :
We Republicans supported the GOP for decades with our voice and vote yet all we got was the same old, same old from the collaborationist GOP to whom we faithful Republicans have given undying allegiance for decade after decade after decade; hoping against hope that “Ah. At last! NOW we’ll get some action.” When, in the end, it has just been more spending, more debt, more taxation, more crummy, stupid, useless “Programs”; more caving, more giving in to the crooked Dems, more abandonment of principled governance and even worse……the enrichment of their own venal, corrupt selves as they have COLLABORATED with a real, live enemy within.
I do. not. care. what Trump would do if he were to be elected.
We need a junkyard dog to go in there and tear that place apart; kick down doors; throw over the tables.
Actually, that will all happen eventually anyway so perhaps Trump can offer us a more controlled destruction which might not end in chaos and anarchy.